The Door Between Their Hearts

My name is Pierre Spaulding, I'm thirty-four years old, and I roast coffee for a living, which means my garage always smells like a bakery that's on fire a little bit. That Thursday I had a batch of Ethiopian beans going in the drum roaster when I heard Marcie laugh through the shared wall.

Marcie is my ex-wife. She's thirty-three, she does logistics for the military, and she has lived in the duplex next to mine since before we were married, which is a long story nobody needs. The divorce was final eight months ago. We've been neighbors the whole time, which is its own long story.

Her laugh came through the drywall like it always does, sharp and bright, the kind of laugh that makes strangers in restaurants turn around. But this time it was followed by a man's voice I didn't recognize. Deep. Relaxed. A voice used to being heard over engine noise.

I pulled the beans at first crack and stood there holding the cooling tray like an idiot, listening. Another laugh. A woman's voice this time. Then Marcie again, saying something I couldn't make out, and both of them cracking up.

"Great," I said to the beans. "She's got people over."

I went inside and messed with my espresso machine for a while. It didn't need messing with. I descaled it anyway. Then I cleaned the portafilter, which was already clean. Somewhere in there I became aware that I was avoiding my own living room because my ex-wife's voice was coming through the wall and I didn't want to sit with it.

That's when I saw the note on the floor by the front door. Folded once, my name on it in pen. Marcie's handwriting, the same loopy print she used on grocery lists when we lived together. It must have come under the door while I was out in the garage.

It said: Come over. 8pm. No weirdness. M

I read it four times. Then I checked the clock. It was 7:40.

"No weirdness," I said out loud. "Sure. That's my whole brand."

I changed my shirt twice, which felt pathetic, and settled on the first one anyway. At 7:58 I walked across the dirt patch we both laughingly called our yards and knocked on her door.

* * *

Marcie opened it already grinning, and the grin got bigger when she saw my face.

"You look nervous," she said. "Good."

"You said no weirdness. Showing up at your ex-wife's door with a note like a spy is textbook weirdness."

"It's not weirdness, it's logistics." She was wearing jeans and a green top and she smelled like her soap, the same one from when we were married, and I hated that I noticed. "Come in. Beer?"

Her living room had two strangers on the couch. A big guy in a faded green t-shirt, short hair, forearms like bridge cable, holding a beer like he was auditioning for the label. Next to him a woman with dark hair pulled back in a clip, lean, wearing a flight suit jacket over a tank top, boots still on. They both looked up at me with the easy curiosity of people who'd already been briefed.

"Pierre," Marcie announced, "these are my friends from the base days. Richie and Barbara. Guys, this is Pierre. My ex-husband."

"Ex-husband," Richie repeated, and he stood up to shake my hand. His grip was firm and short. "She didn't lead with that."

"I led with it eventually," Marcie said.

"Eventually is doing a lot of work in that sentence," Barbara said, offering her hand. Hers was calloused in a way I recognized from people who work with their hands under pressure. "Hi, Pierre. I'm the one who made her write the note. She was going to keep chickening out."

"I was not going to chicken out," Marcie said. "I was going to wait for a more natural moment."

"Three weeks is not a natural moment," Barbara said.

"I'm a flight nurse," she added to me, like an explanation. "I'm on leave. Richie's on leave too. We're staying at her place for a week and she promised us fun and all we've done is watch her reorganize her kitchen."

"It's a good kitchen," Richie said.

"It's a very organized kitchen," Barbara agreed.

Marcie shoved a beer into my hand and steered me into the armchair across from the couch. The setup was so obvious I almost laughed. Two on the couch, me in the single chair, her standing in the middle like she was a game show host.

"So," I said. "What is this?"

"It's a game night," Marcie said, producing a board game from behind the couch cushion like she'd been holding it there for a photo op.

"It's a game night," Richie echoed, deadpan, taking a pull of his beer.

"With three people who clearly already had a meeting about me," I said.

"There was no meeting," Marcie said, way too fast.

"There was absolutely a meeting," Barbara said. "Tuesday. It ran long."

"Barbara."

"What? He's a grown man. He can hear that we had a meeting."

I looked at Marcie. She had the decency to look about sixty percent sheepish. "Fine. We talked about you. Happy?"

"Not happy, no. Confused. Why were you talking about me?"

"Because you're interesting," Richie said simply, like he was reporting the weather. "She talks about you. A lot. Way more than you'd talk about an ex if you were actually done with an ex."

"Richie," Marcie said, in the tone you use on a dog that's about to bolt off the porch.

"I'm just saying facts, Flores."

"I'm thirty-three years old," Marcie said, turning to me, hands on her hips like a foreman. "I got married at twenty-eight, divorced at thirty-two, and since then my love life has been me and a battery-operated situation and I am bored, Pierre. I'm bored and I trust exactly three people on this planet and two of them are on my couch and one of them is holding my beer."

"Which is delicious," Richie said.

"So I thought," she went on, "instead of doing this the normal way, where everybody lies for four months, I'd just put all the cards on the table. That's why I wrote no weirdness. Because the whole point is no weirdness."

"Pointing at the weirdness while saying no weirdness doesn't remove the weirdness," I said.

"See, I like him," Barbara said to Richie.

"He's okay," Richie said.

I took a long drink of the beer. "Okay, let's say I follow this. You three had a meeting. About me. And the plan is..."

"There's no plan," Marcie said.

"There's kind of a plan," Barbara said.

"There is a direction," Richie offered.

"A direction," I repeated.

"Nobody has to do anything," Marcie said, and for the first time all night her voice dropped out of parade volume into something real. "That is the entire point. If you drink your beer, play one stupid game, and go home, that's fine. Nothing happens. But I know you, Pierre. I know what you sound like through a wall. And I know you've been roasting coffee alone in that garage every night for eight months like a monk, and it makes me sad, and I don't like being sad about you."

The room got quiet. Richie looked at Barbara. Barbara looked at her boots, then up at me, and something in her face said she'd been the one arguing for me in that Tuesday meeting.

"So," Marcie said. "Candy Land or Scrabble?"

"That's not the choice on the table and you know it," I said.

"Scrabble it is," she said, and sat down on the arm of my chair.

Her hand came to rest on my shoulder, light as anything, and she left it there.

"Scrabble is a lie," Barbara announced, already digging in the box. "She brought Cards Against Humanity. She always brings this."

"It's a good icebreaker," Marcie said.

"It's a game for cowards," Richie said. "You hide behind jokes for two hours instead of talking."

"And yet you own a copy," Marcie said.

"I own two copies," he admitted. "We combined them. There are like six hundred cards in there. It's a monster."

It was a monster. Marcie dragged the coffee table closer and we all sat on the floor around it, which I had not agreed to in any formal way, but somehow there I was, cross-legged on her rug with a handful of terrible white cards. Barbara sat to my left. Marcie took my right. Richie spread out as if he owned the whole floor.

The first hand went to Barbara, naturally. She played "semen-stained leggings" against Marcie's "my divorce" and I laughed so hard I had to put my beer down.

"Okay, that's dark," Marcie said, pointing at her.

"You put your own divorce in the pot," Barbara said. "I just harvested it."

"That's my line of work," Richie said. "Harvesting."

"Logistics," Marcie said. "He's a logistics guy too. We once moved a battalion's worth of supplies across three states in a weekend."

"A legend," Richie said, hand on his heart.

Somewhere in the third round I noticed Barbara's hand on my knee. Not grabbing, just resting there, warm through the denim, and she'd give it a little pat whenever one of her cards hit. The fourth time she did it she left it a beat longer than a pat requires.

"You're doing a thing," I said quietly, so the other two wouldn't hear